Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  I noticed he had a kind of worried expression on his face.

  “Who was it?” I said.

  “Harm Groenwald,” he said. “The cattleman who rented Old Man Paddler’s pasture.”

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  And Dad answered, “He’s all burned up about something. He’s got two dead lambs this morning. Somebody’s dogs—or dog—got into the pasture last night and killed them.” He sighed and then finished, “But I told him our dog couldn’t possibly have done it, because he was tied right here all night.”

  When my dad said that, I got a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach. Like a terribly fast-moving story, I was remembering that Alexander had chased sheep and pulled off a lamb’s tail in that same pasture earlier in the week. Also I was remembering that at three o’clock in the morning he had been loose—and maybe had been for three whole hours.

  I was so weak for a minute that you could have knocked me over with a small whirlwind. A terribly fast whirlwind was going round in my mind right that minute, scattering my thoughts all over the Sugar Creek territory. I certainly wouldn’t put it past that dog to chase sheep or anything else at midnight.

  Just then Wally came out to see what we were doing and why. Something in my mind said I had better tell my dad about what happened last night, but with Wally there, I hated to say it and have him think my dog training venture had been such a failure.

  10

  I tell you it doesn’t feel very good to have something on your mind like I had on mine, knowing that Alexander had been loose part of last night—probably long enough to have killed two innocent lambs in Harm Groenwald’s pasture. If it could be proved that Wally’s dog had actually done it, Wally would have to pay for the loss of both of them—probably twenty-five dollars apiece.

  It had been fun teasing Wally about it when Alexander had come galloping back with a lamb’s tail in his mouth, but now it was different. Why, Alexander himself might even have to be killed.

  Then I got an idea. If Alexander had actually killed those two lambs, there might be traces of blood in his mouth. There might even be bits of wool caught between his teeth, the way a boy gets bits of fried chicken in his when he eats. He might have gotten so hungry, being tired of no-odor dog biscuits, that he had killed the lambs on purpose to get a taste of fresh mutton.

  I coaxed him to let me look at his teeth.

  Alexander didn’t like the idea very well, and Wally, who was watching, said, “What are you trying to do to him?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “I’m just examining his teeth.”

  “They’re all right,” Wally assured me. “I took him to a dentist just before we left Memory City.”

  “The dentist!” I had never heard of such a

  thing as taking a dog to a dentist.

  Well, the day was started, and we had a lot of things to do before another one thousand forty minutes would be gone. Then there would be another day, and after that, Sunday, when Wally would go to Sunday school and church with us. It would probably be his first time to go in a long time because Uncle Amos and my red aunt had quit going, which meant that Wally had been growing up to be an American heathen.

  Believe me, we kept Alexander tied up every night. I was especially careful to see to it that he was and also that his collar was good and tight. As the nights passed, and nobody’s dogs or dog bothered Mr. Groenwald’s or anybody else’s sheep, I kept wondering if Alexander really had killed the two lambs between midnight and three o’clock on the one night he had been loose.

  I knew that before long—certainly before Wally left—I’d have to tell somebody about it, because if Harm Groenwald’s sheep had been raided on only that one night, then Alexander must have been the guilty dog. I still didn’t want to tell Wally, because he’d think I was a failure as a dog trainer, and he might blame me for the dead lambs. Also, he’d worry because he’d be afraid Alexander might have to be shot. I didn’t like to tell Dad because—well, because I just didn’t. And if I told Mom, she might get hurt in her heart, and that’d make mine hurt even worse. It seemed there wasn’t anybody I could tell.

  And as my little polecat clock kept ticking off the minutes, I kept feeling sadder and sadder. Of course, I thought, I could keep still till after Uncle Amos and my red aunt come back from their vacation, and then both Wally and Alexander will be gone, and everything will be all right—or will it?

  Then Sunday morning came, and we all went to Sunday school and church, where I got the surprise of my life. Wally, who was in the same class with the rest of the gang, knew the answer to practically every question our teacher asked.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. What on earth? I thought. I simply couldn’t understand how a boy who hardly ever went to Sunday school and didn’t know beans about the Bible could, all of a sudden, know practically everything about that rather hard lesson.

  During the church service, which followed Sunday school, I learned something that made me feel even worse about Mr. Groenwald’s two dead lambs and Alexander the Coppersmith and Wally. Sylvia’s dad’s sermon—the part of it that was especially for boys and girls—was a true story about Robert Louis Stevenson. As nearly everybody knows, he was a famous writer who lived a long time ago and who wrote a lot of books, such as Treasure Island and a book of poems called A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  When Sylvia’s dad mentioned A Child’s Garden of Verses, I looked at Poetry to see if he was listening. He was, with both hands up to his ears. That reminded me of the way Alexander looked when he listened to something, with both of his copper ears standing straight up and with his nose pointing in the direction the sound was coming from.

  For a second I imagined myself to be a dog listening with my ears straight up. Then, because I felt myself smiling at myself for being a dog, I frowned instead, because anybody, especially my parents, wouldn’t understand why I was smiling and would think I shouldn’t.

  Well, when Robert Louis Stevenson was just a little guy, he had a nurse taking care of him, as small boys did in those days in his country, which was Scotland. First, Sylvia’s dad quoted part of a poem that Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote and which goes like this:

  In winter I get up at night

  And dress by yellow candle light;

  In summer, quite the other way,

  I have to go to bed by day.

  Poor little Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought and felt sorry for him. It had been so long since I was little and had to go to bed by day that I could hardly remember it. But in the winter I still had to get up before daylight to get breakfast over and the chores done and started off to our one room, red brick school, to get there on time. I had memorized that little poem myself when I was in the second grade.

  Sylvia’s dad went on to tell us that one day when it was time for little Robert to go to bed, he didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay outdoors until it got dark. It was almost dark but not quite, and he was sitting out on the steps looking up at the stars. His nurse called him to come in three times, and still he didn’t come. So she went out to get him.

  “What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you come when I called you?” she asked.

  Little Robert answered, “I’m out here watching God open up lights in the darkness,” meaning he was watching God turn on the stars one at a time.

  Then Sylvia’s dad explained that every Christian ought to do more than just watch God turn on lights in people’s hearts—we ought to help Him do it. “Have you turned on the light in anybody’s heart this week?” he asked.

  I couldn’t think of anybody I had done that to. I had been trying to turn on a few lights in a dog’s mind. But so far, Alexander had turned most of them off again.

  When we got home and Dad and I were out by the garden waiting for dinner to be ready, I told him about Wally being able to answer practically every question the teacher asked. Dad said, “You can give your mother credit for that. She spent all week opening up lights in his mind.”

  “
She what?” I asked.

  So Dad explained that at the beginning of the week Wally had told Mom he didn’t want to go to Sunday school because he didn’t want to seem like a dumbbell in class. So she had taught him the lesson ahead of time—which explains what he and Mom were doing nearly every day while she baked pies or cakes and did other things in the kitchen. And he helped her by sitting on the bench behind the table, listening—and also eating cookies, which was the way Mom got him to sit still long enough for her to turn the lights on, since his mind was a pretty dark place.

  Then Dad and I went in to dinner.

  But I didn’t feel very good. It seemed God was trying to turn on a light somewhere, and He wanted me to help Him do it. I kept thinking about it all through dinner, not eating as much as I usually do, and I excused myself before the rest of the family and Wally were done.

  I went outdoors to Alexander’s cedar-treated mattress, where he had just finished his dinner of no-odor dog biscuits. He was standing up in his bed, looking hungrily at the kitchen door and probably smelling our fried chicken and wishing he could have some.

  I stooped down and hugged him. “Listen, little dog friend,” I said to him, “I know all about what you did last Wednesday night. But it’s all my fault. I’m to blame. I didn’t do it on purpose but was only trying to turn on a light in your mind. And now Wally, or I, or somebody, owes Harm Groenwald about fifty dollars, and maybe you’ll have to be shot to death.”

  He touched my cheek with his cold nervous nose and, before I could get away, licked my face with his long red tongue.

  Then I got another idea. I moseyed on out to the barn and went inside and climbed the ladder to the alfalfa-smelling haymow. That was where I used to keep my little New Testament in a crack in a log away up on top of a hill of hay near the roof. I used to kneel down there in the hay and tell the One who made the stars practically all the troubles I ever had. And nearly always He would take them away or make me think of something I could do to get rid of them myself.

  “Hi, old Bentcomb,” I said to my favorite hen.

  She was sitting on her favorite nest, waiting till she could get her daily egg laid and then get out with the rest of the hens in the barnyard. She didn’t answer but sort of ducked her head, as much as to say, “Don’t bother me. I’m busy.”

  Then I went on up to my corner.

  Even before I started to pray, it seemed I knew what I was supposed to do. I had one hundred dollars in the bank, I thought, and would still have fifty dollars left if I went to Mr. Groenwald and gave him twenty-five for each dead lamb. Also, if I took Alexander with me and let him see what a fine dog he was, what a pretty half-long nose he had, how active he was, how he would sit up and bark for a biscuit you offered him and would chase after a stick and bring it galloping back to you, and how he had learned not to bark at night (not as bad as he used to, anyway), and explain how he was a city dog and not used to country life and didn’t know any better—then maybe Mr. Groenwald would like Alexander and forgive him and everything would be all right.

  I wouldn’t even need to tell Mom or Dad or Wally or anybody at all, although I supposed Dad would find out about my taking fifty dollars from my savings account and want to know why. But I wouldn’t mind telling him after Wally’s ten thousand minutes were over and he was gone.

  When I got through praying, I stood up, for a minute looking down at the place where my two knees had been. I felt very happy inside, as if I had maybe done one of the most important things in the world.

  Of course, my prayer hadn’t sounded much like Old Man Paddler’s had, but it did seem I had been talking to the same wonderful Person he had. And it didn’t make any difference where anybody was when he talked to Him—in an old Abraham Lincoln style cabin in the hills, or in the moonlight that filtered in through a boy’s bedroom window, or on a hill of alfalfa hay in the haymow of a Sugar Creek barn. He was always glad to listen.

  Then I climbed down the haymow ladder and went outdoors again. Old Mixy spied me and started meowing toward me, and I knew that she was in a hurry to rub her innocent sides against my pant legs. Her tail was straight up in the air, the way it always is when she walks like that. It was just like the tail of the little black and white animal out in the woods, except that her tail didn’t mean the same thing because she wasn’t that kind of a kitty.

  She followed all around me till she got almost to the grape arbor. There she stopped stock-still and spit, arching her back at the same time toward Alexander, who growled back at her from the end of his tight leash. Then she decided to go on back to the barn and did.

  I stopped beside Alexander, who, as soon as he stopped looking at Mixy, pushed a friendly nose into my hand as if we were good friends.

  “Well, old pal,” I said, “it’s all set. The first chance we get, we’re going to take a walk through the woods, just the two of us.”

  11

  Now that it was all settled in my mind what I had to do, I realized that I had to get going on it as quick as I could or it would be too late.

  While I was still talking to Alexander, Dad called me from the back door, saying, “Bill, telephone!”

  I quickly went into the house, passing the stack of dishes in the kitchen sink with a sinking sensation in my mind and went on into the front room to the telephone.

  It was Poetry, wanting to know if Wally and I could come over to his house and sleep in his big tent that night. “We’ll have to get going, or it will be too late.”

  “Get going on what?” I asked.

  He answered, “Don’t you remember? We were going to take Wally to our hideout in the toolshed loft.”

  I had been hoping maybe Poetry would forget about that. The mischievous things he and I had planned to do to Wally had seemed wonderful before Wally had come, when I still thought he was dumber than any boy I had ever seen. But after what happened that morning during the Sunday school lesson, he didn’t seem like such a scatterbrained boy after all.

  Also, right that minute I wasn’t in a mischievous mood, because of Alexander and the two dead lambs. So I said to Poetry, “Wait a minute. I’ll ask Mom,” hoping she would say no, as she had done quite a few times in my life when I had wanted to stay all night with Poetry in his big tent.

  I laid the phone on the lamp pedestal of our old-fashioned organ and went out to the kitchen.

  “Poetry wants Wally and me to sleep in his big tent tonight. You don’t want us to, do you?” I looked at Mom’s face, which I had never gotten tired of looking at, even if it wasn’t as pretty as my red aunt’s or Little Jim’s mom’s. Little Jim’s mom was the prettiest mother in the whole Sugar Creek territory.

  But Mom didn’t say no. “Yes,” she said. “I think that will be all right. What do you say, Wally?”

  “It’s all right with me,” Wally said. “Sure, I’d like that.”

  And that was the beginning of what was going to make our little whirlwind, which had started when Wally came, turn into a tornado.

  Wally and I decided to go over to Poetry’s in the afternoon to take our pajamas and also Alexander the Coppersmith’s mattress and a package of no-odor biscuits. Wally insisted that Alexander had to sleep there, too. “He’d be too nervous sleeping here all alone, and he might bark all night and keep your folks awake,” he said.

  So we loaded everything in my little red coaster wagon, which I used to play with a lot when I was little and which I still used to pull Charlotte Ann around in.

  “What you taking the alarm clock for?” Wally asked when he and I started out toward the walnut tree.

  Before I thought, I said, “That’s to tell us when it’s midnight.”

  “Midnight! Who wants to know when it’s midnight when he’s asleep?”

  I managed to change the subject, because it was at midnight that Poetry and I planned to wake Wally and take him on a little walk to Poetry’s dad’s log cabin, which had a family of black and white woods cats living under it.

  I still didn’t kno
w how we were going to get Wally to go with us, but Poetry had told me on the phone that it was his secret and to quit worrying about how. “Just trust me,” he had said.

  At the last moment, Mom decided to send along some old sheets for our cots, so Poetry’s mom wouldn’t have to furnish her own. Poetry’s mother would think that was nice of Mom, I thought.

  Since both families were going to church at night, as nearly all the Sugar Creek Gang’s parents did every Sunday, we could have our cots made up and be ready to tumble into them the minute we got home to Poetry’s house.

  As we rambled along down the road, pulling the little red wagon behind us, I was wishing all the time that Poetry would change his mind.

  It didn’t take us long to get to the little lane that leads past the toolshed. Wally was pulling the wagon at the time, and Alexander was pulling me. He was on the dog end of the leash and I on the other.

  “Let’s go get a skunk this afternoon,” Wally said.

  All week long he had been teasing me to help him catch one, and every time I had talked him out of it, giving him nine reasons. Two of them were my parents, and seven of them were the mother skunk and her six kittens, every one of which, I warned Wally, carried a musk pouch and could spray six times without stopping, which would be forty-two shots a boy would have to dodge.

  So when Wally said, “Let’s go get a skunk,” and at the same time Alexander acted as if he was in favor of it, I said flatly, “Absolutely not!”

  “But you can sell one for twenty-five dollars,” Wally argued. “Wouldn’t you like twenty-five dollars?”

  “It’s worth twenty-five dollars not to get shot.” Then I remembered and told him, “They don’t generally come out until around twilight or after dark, and the only safe way to catch one without getting perfumed is like Circus did it.”

  Once more Wally let me talk him out of it, but I could see he had his mind on the twenty-five dollars and was willing to run the risk of getting shot with something that was a lot stronger than three parts water and one part household ammonia.